Mental Flosshttp://mentalfloss.com/node/16695/atom.xml2015-08-02T22:25:56+00:00http://mentalfloss.com/article/16695/first-time-news-was-fit-print-ii2007-07-18T18:44:50+00:002007-10-11T16:46:50+00:00The First Time News Was Fit To Print, IIJason

Using my all-access pass to The New York Times archives, I've once again pulled up the first mentions of newsworthy topics. (Here's the first installment.) Many of today's items were requested last time around. You best believe this will become a trilogy, so keep those requests coming.

The big change in Fred Trump's operations in recent years is the advent of his son, Donald....Donald, who was graduated first in his class from the Wharton School of Finance of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, joined his father about five years ago. He has what his father calls "drive." He also possesses, in his father's judgment, business acumen. "Donald is the smartest person I know," he remarked admirably. "Everything he touches turns to gold."

A student spokesman at Wellesley responded with anger when Senator Edward Brooke called it foolish "to propound demands for social change in a vacuum, oblivious to the substantial changes already in progress."
"We feel," said Hillary D. Rodham, president of the Wellesley College Government Association, "that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears impossible, the possible."

For all the human traffic that the Web attracts, most sites remain fairly solitary destinations. People shop by themselves, retrieve information alone and post messages that they hope others will eventually notice. But some sites are looking for ways to enable visitors not only to interact but even to collaborate to change the sites themselves. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) is one such site, a place where 100 or so volunteers have been working since January to compile a free encyclopedia. Using a relatively unknown and simple software tool called Wiki, they are involved in a kind of virtual barn-raising.

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta reported yesterday that an infant who had received blood transfusions developed a serious immune-deficiency disease that has principally afflicted homosexuals.

The child had received multiple transfusions of blood and blood products, including a transfusion from a man who later proved to have acquired immune deficiency syndrome, called AIDS, The disorder has been linked primarily to homosexual men. The child died at the age of 20 months from infections related to the immune deficiency.

The Starbucks Coffee Company, Washington State's largest coffee roaster, announced a retail price cut of 50 cents a pound on all its coffee. Jerry Baldwin, president, said it was also reducing its price to wholesale customers by 30 cents a pound. Starbucks supplies specialty stores, restaurants and food cooperatives throughout the Western states.

Scientists have warned the human race that it is running the risk of allowing pollution to destroy life in the oceans and to alter the earth's climate by raising temperatures....J.O. Fletcher, a physical scientist for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, said that man had "only a few decades to solve the problem" of global warming caused by pollution.

Among the notices of trademark applications published this week is one from the Nintendo Playing Card Company, Ltd., Kyoto City, Japan. The notice explains that one of the Japanese characters in the mark means "happiness, fortune or wealth." Three other characters, pronounced "nintendo," are harder to translate. They constitute a fanciful expression having no precise dictionary meaning either in Japanese or English, but the application gives them the approximate sense of "a corporation whose fortune or prosperity should be left to the mercy of heaven." Evidently heaven has smiled on the Nintendo Company, because it has been using the mark since 1887.

The lure to the individual or small businessman is that by investing a little money and lots of time, he can derive the benefits of a widely known name, cooperative advertising, "protected" territories and a cram course on how to run the business. A coast-to-coast chain, McDonald's Hamburgers, gives its franchisees a three-week course in everything from advertising to janitoring.